Hampton To Try Out Recycling

HAMPTON — Selected neighborhoods will be asked this fall to participate in a curbside recycling program that will serve as a model for a future citywide collection effort.

Five thousand households that represent a cross-section of city residents have been targeted for the pilot program, which is slated to begin Sept. 1, said Edmund Panzer, the city's public works director.

The program will provide weekly service to four areas of the city: the LaSalle Avenue and Shell Road neighborhood; the Fairfield, Foxbourne Place and Essex Park area off of Fox Hill Road; Todds Lane, including the Farmington subdivision; and parts of Phoebus.

Waste Management Inc., which will operate the program for the city, will provide those homes with containers in which residents can dump old newspapers, aluminum cans, plastics and glass. Residents will not need to sort those materials but can dump them all in one container, Panzer said.

The containers will be collected weekly, on a day that those residents normally receive trash service, he said.

Panzer said he does not know how much trash will be diverted from the landfill as a result of the program but expects about 40 percent of the targeted homes to participate.

Among the questions officials hope the pilot program will answer are how much trash gets diverted from the landfill, how strong the markets are for recycled goods, how willing Hampton residents are to recycle, and how best to educate the public.

Panzer said the city is hoping residents will participate based on a feeling of prestige of being selected - and a sense of environmental responsibility.

"There is no other incentive for them," he said. "We're not giving them any kind of breaks."

To provide an economic incentive to recycle, City Manager Robert J. O'Neill Jr. has proposed imposing a user fee that would charge residents for every bag of trash they want thrown away. Recyclable materials would be collected at no charge under the proposal, while a fee would be attached to every bag of trash.

The City Council will hear a presentation on the trash fee plan July 11. A public hearing on the proposal has been scheduled for Aug. 8.

Waste Management, the nation's largest hauler, was the only firm to submit a bid for a contract to manage the city's test program, said Bronson L. Parker, the city's purchasing director.

Parker said the $137,400 contract with Waste Management should be signed by July 1.

Two other companies - BFI Waste Systems and Bay Disposal - had expressed interest in the contract but declined to submit bids.

Tony Davies, area manager for Bay Disposal, said his firm had little time to prepare a bid and had reservations about making the investment needed for a relatively small, short-term program.

William Lacy, district manager for BFI, said some unrelated internal problems prevented his company from bidding.

But the lack of bidders also illustrates what industry officials have said is a pervasive problem in the recycling business: the difficulty of turning a profit.

"You cannot make money recycling," Lacy said. "It does not pay for itself."

He said the only economic incentive haulers have to operate recycling programs is the long-term savings that can be achieved in landfill dumping costs.

The Hampton recycling program's goal is to meet new state mandates that call for reducing the waste stream by 25 percent by 1995. Localities have complained that while the state has imposed collection mandates for recycled goods, it has done little to promote a market for those goods, making it difficult to turn a profit.

Under Hampton's pilot program, Waste Management, not the city, will be responsible for collecting recyclable materials and finding a buyer for them, Panzer said.